12 September, 2014

Jorge Ayala Paris: on shaping emotions, architecture and fashion

As two creative realms that share a high level of social influence owing to their sensorial materialities, fashion and architecture have on many occasions joined forces through fruitful collaborations that have resulted not only in inspiring postulations, but also in seductive exercises about the perception of physical spaces and materials.A believer in the importance of examining the relationships, equations and dependencies between architecture and fashion, Mexican-born and Paris-based architect Jorge Ayala recently opened the first concept store for his eponymous fashion label in the French capital as a continuation of his investigations. In addition to being an analysis of how the concept of retail space can be an extension of sartorial creativity, the store also questions how the shopping experience shapes consumers’ emotional and intellectual reactions to a fashion brand.By enveloping its own visitor within a décor that reproduces the patterns and shapes of its collection’s garments and accessories in wallpaper prints, light fixtures and projected films, the architecture and fashion present in the Jorge Ayala Paris store highlight (either individually or through their dialectic relationship) how behaviour and taste can be constructed by financial imperatives. And as an elegant critique about how the fulfilment of the mind goes beyond empirical reactions to style, ultimately Ayala’s concept store is a successful educational exercise that dethrones established notions of trade marketing, brand adoption and commercial identification.